Persona 6 Needs To Have A Prominent Trans Character

thegamer.com:

Persona feels like the perfect series to embody LGBTQ+ themes and characters. For years, it has featured a cast of young outcasts fighting for a better world. Parts of their lives, appearance, or upbringing always paints them as someone who doesn’t fit in with the status quo. Unfortunately, being queer also means you often fall into such a camp.

Yet for years, Atlus has either failed to capitalise upon this obvious thematic link or seeks to throw people like me under the bus with needless jokes or haphazard storytelling that only leaves us feeling hurt. Persona 4 got awfully close with Naoto Shirogane and Kanji Tatsumi, while you can also read between the lines in other games to craft your own pairings. But much of that is subtext, which isn’t enough in the modern era.

Related: Sekiro Is Secretly The Best Rhythm Game Ever Made

We no longer live in a society where young people are raised to view queer people as an oddity. The world has moved on so much that gender fluidity and sexual expression have become increasingly common. You only need to scroll through TikTok for a handful of minutes before coming across gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and non-binary people expressing themselves without fear of judgment and it’s so wonderful to see. Bigotry remains, but we’re braver and more ambitious than ever before, and we’re capable of fighting back against such things and striving for a better existence.

The worst kind of gamers would love to label Japan as an untouchable haven of games and anime where politics and queer people don’t exist, but that isn’t the reality no matter how much they and their body pillows like to think so. Japanese people can be and very much are queer like the rest of the world, and denying that